U.S. Pat. No. 5,579,456 for "Direct Rendering of Textured Height Fields" shows the a process for creating "a dynamic textured display, images of textured height fields(elevation samples arrayed on a rectangular coordinate grid, as to represent terrain)" and for rendering the image. However, the process taught re-samples the height field data into a radial form and does not show the process of converting the regular grid raw data into regular interval triangular strips nor the subsequent step of computing the relative illumination of each triangle in the strips, and passing the strips to a graphic processor.
This invention focuses on the specific issues in pre-processing gridded terrain data in order to achieve a real-time, computer efficient formulation for fast execution.